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The Biden administration has demanded that TikTok's Chinese owners divest their stakes in the popular video app or face a possible US ban, the company told Reuters on Wednesday. The move is the most dramatic in a series of recent steps by US officials and legislators who have raised fears that TikTok's US user data could be passed on to China's government. ByteDance-owned TikTok has more than 100 million US users. It is also the first time under the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden that a potential ban on TikTok has been threatened. Biden's predecessor, Republican Donald Trump, had tried to ban TikTok in 2020 but was blocked by US courts. TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Reuters that the company had recently heard from the US Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which demanded that the Chinese owners of the app sell their shares, and said otherwise they would face a possib...

Many in the United States see TikTok, the highly popular video-sharing app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, as a threat to national security. The following is a look at five reasons why: Data sharing TikTok -- like its rivals Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube -- thrives on data and there seems to be no limit to how much young users are willing to share about themselves on the super addictive app. TikTok's critics worry that all this information is being processed by a Chinese company in China where the Communist Party reigns supreme. But some experts believe the threat is overblown and that nefarious actors can make their way to the troves of data no matter who owns the platform and where it is based. "If we're talking about US citizen data, it's the Wild West," said Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. "There's very little regulation, companies collect tons of data all the time, whether they...